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Category: Geek

I’ve always been annoyed that the fans in my server spin all the time (wasting power, making noise) when they’re not needed. The only reason they’re there is to cool my hard drives – which aren’t in use half the time.

Load the kernel modules at each boot

The modprobe commands will load the specific kernel modules for your hardware enabling your computer to detect, read, and control these fans. But we want to make sure they run each time you boot your machine – to do that unRAID, we have to modify the ‘go’ file that runs each time your machine starts.

Open up your unRAID ‘go’ file in an editor

nano /boot/config/go

Take the lines that start with modprobe from the sensors-detect output and add them to your ‘go’file. Do not add in the ‘/user/bin/sensors -s’ line.

Save and quit nano (Ctrl-X, Yes)

Reboot your unRAID server. (Or, alternatively, you can run the modprobe commands from the command line to load the kernel modules without rebooting).

After you reboot (or run the modprobe commands), you can run the sensors command from a command prompt which should show you the status of all the temperature sensors your machine knows about.

Figure out which controls what

Next up, you’ll need to figure out which device controls what fan, as well as the minimum power that needs to be applied for a given fan to keep spinning.

Fans are controlled in Linux by assigning a value between 0 and 255 to the Pulse Width Modulated (PWM) fan header (0 is off, 255 is max power).

The pwmconfig tool runs through all of your fan headers and vary the power output to find out which fans are controlled by each header.

To run it, SSH into your machine and run:

pwmconfig

When prompted, answer “yes” to generating a detailed correlation.

When prompted to set up the configuration file, say “no”.

The output will be long. What you’re looking for are the following things.

You should also physically check that this shut off the fan you expect it to (i.e. your case fan stopped spinning, not your CPU fan).

Find the minimum fan start speed

Fans have momentum – because pwmconfig was working down from the highest-to-lowest speed, it found the lowest speed it would keep spinning after it was already moving. To find the starting speed, you have to work upwards from 0.

In my case, the “75” stopping PWM was not enough to get the fan to start from 0:

You can check to see if the script is running automatically by looking in your unRAID log file (and observing your fan speeds).

Final notes

You may want to adjust the FAN_OFF_TEMP and FAN_HIGH_TEMP to tune when the fans come on and off for your particular application.

Finally, I have to thank all of the various folks who created the original script, who’ve posted on the unRAID forums, the unRAID wiki, etc. I pieced this together from a lot of good information from the folks that have done this before me.

If you have Windows running in a virtual machine (VM), you may find yourself wanting to reduce the overall disk-footprint of the VM’s virtual disk on your host.

For example: because I had created my Windows VM by copying a raw disk in it’s entirety, I had a 120GB VM raw image (.img) file for a Windows installation that was only taking up about 20GB of actual space.

It took a bit of research for me to piece together all of the steps required to reduce my 120GB image down to a reasonable size. Here’s the steps I took.

Assumptions

You’re using KVM as your hypervisor. There may be some tips in here that are useful for other VMs, but I’m assuming you’re using KVM.

Your .img file is in a raw image file format. There may be some tips in here if you’re trying to shrink a qcow2 image file, but you should probably not follow this verbatim.

This process is risky – be careful and don’t blame me if things go amiss. And make backups before you start.

You are okay deleting the “recovery partition” on your Windows VM image. This process will most certainly delete the recovery partition (if it exists). For most people, this isn’t a big deal… if you need to recover Windows, there are other ways to do it and the partition was just wasting space.

Reduce the size of your Windows partition

This turns out to be more involved than you’d think. That’s mainly because there are several steps to take to enable Windows to pack all of your data into one end of the disk partition so it’s size can be reduced.

These steps are useful if you’ve ever encountered the “You cannot shrink a volume beyond the point where any unmovable files are located” error when trying to shrink a partition in Windows.

For step 4 (Defrag your ‘hard disk’), this turned out to be a tricky step with a very simple answer. Most folks will point you to the Windows UI to “Optimize” your disk. However, if Windows thinks your C: drive is an SSD it (correctly) won’t do a defrag on it.

To get around that, simply run defrag from an elevated / admin command prompt!

defrag C: /U /V

Consider running defrag twice – once as above, and once again with the /X option is to consolidate free space.

Shrink your Windows partition

Launch the Windows Disk Management console (Protip: you can get to it by right clicking in the lower left hand corner of your screen and selecting “Disk Management”)

Right click on the main partition of your C drive.

Select Shrink Volume

After some thinking, you should be able to set the size of the disk as small as you’d like. Make your selection and click “Shrink”

Make note of the final size of the of all the partitions on the disk – you’ll need that number for when you go to reduce the .img size in the next step. It’s safer to round-up than down!

Shutdown your Windows VM

You’ll want to shut down Windows now. You don’t want it running when you’re cutting down the .img file size.

Shrink the image (.img) file

This is where the magic happens… and it’s not that complicated.

Locate your .img file. In my case, I’m running unRAID, so my VM images are all in /usr/mnt/domains by default.

Make a copy of your VM’s .img file. You’ll want it in case this screws up.

cp ./vdisk.img ./backup_vdisk.img

Shrink the image to the size you want it to be. Remember, this has to be bigger than the total size of the Windows partitions on the disk. So, if there’s a 1GB partition and a 30GB partition, it’s probably safe to shrink the image down to 32GB to be safe.

Expand the size of your Windows partition

If you rounded up when shrinking your .img file, you probably have some extra unallocated space a the end of your Windows partition. To make use of it:

Launch the Disk Management console

Right click on your Windows partition

Select Extend Volume and follow the dialog to increase the space of the partition

Consider converting from raw .img to qcow2

There are pros and cons to each format; some of the pros of qcow2 are the ability to snapshot the VM and sparse allocation (which can further save space). However raw can be faster. I’m sticking with raw for now.

Because I was turning my Windows 10 Pro server into an Linux (unRAID) machine I already had a Windows installation running on the bare metal that I had spent a fair bit of time setting up. I didn’t want to lose that installation and the work put into it. So, rather than starting over with a fresh Windows installation I took the operating system that was already installed, copied it, and started running it as a virtual machine (VM). Here are the steps I took to convert that Windows installation into a functioning VM.

They’re also useful for anyone running KVM as a hypervisor – not just specific to unRAID.

Before you begin

Makes sure you have access to your Windows license. If you upgraded from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 for free this is really important. If you haven’t already, follow the steps here in “Before you shutdown Windows”.

Your hardware must be capable of processor virtualization (Intel VT-x or AMD-V), and it must be enabled in your BIOS. Depending on what you plan to do with your VM, you may need to meet other hardware requirements.

unRAID must have VMs enabled and configured. An important step here is to download the VirtIO Drivers ISO

unRAID needs to have User Shares created to hold the virtual machine images; by default, these are created for you by a new installation at /mnt/user/domains/

Check to make sure that your User Share (above) has enough room for the full size of your Windows Operating System hard drive. You’re going to copy the entire hard drive including the empty space.

By default, most of these things were done already on my machine, but it’s good to check them before proceeding.

Add a new Virtual Machine

On the VMs tab, click the Windows 10 template (or template for your version of Windows).

Click on the switch for the Basic View to toggle it to the Advanced View (in the upper-right corner of the screen) if it isn’t already set.

Configure the VM with the following settings:

Name your VM whatever you wish: For this example, I’m using “Windows 10”

CPU Mode: Host Passthrough

Logical CPUs: However many you wish (at least one)

Initial Memory / Max Memory: at least 2GB is recommended

Machine: i440fx-* (whatever the newest is)

BIOS: SeaBIOS

Hyper-V: Yes

OS Install ISO: Leave empty

VirtIO Drivers ISO: Select the virtio-win*.iso that (should have been) downloaded as part of enabling VMs on unRAID.

VirtIO Drivers CDRom Bus: IDE

Primary vDisk Location: Auto

Primary vDisk Bus: IDE

Primary vDisk Type: raw

Primary vDisk Size: 0G (You’ll be overwriting this file in the next step)

Graphics Card: VNC

VNC Video Driver: QXL

VNC Password: Set it if you’d like – this is how you’ll access the ‘screen’ of the running VM

VNC Keyboard: Set to the right language for your OS

Sound Card: None (or select one if your device supports passthrough)

Network MAC: this is set randomly, though you can change it.

Network Bridge: br0

USB Devices: I recommend leaving all unchecked for now.

USB Mode: 2.0 (EHCI) is what I found worked for me.

Other PCI Devices: I recommend leaving all unassigned until you confirm the VM launches correctly.

Uncheck Start VM after creation

Hit Create.

Copy the OS Drive to an image

Next up, you need to copy the data from your OS drive to an virtual disk image that the VM can boot off of.

Identify the disk that contains your Windows Operating System. You can find it by looking in the unRAID web UI in the Main tab under Unassigned Devices. Look for the drive that you booted windows off of before you installed unRAID. Make note of the disk id (e.g. sdb, sdc, sde, etc.)

SSH into your unRAID system as root. By default unRAID doesn’t have a root password, but you should have set a strong one by now… right?

Replace Windows\ 10 with the name you gave your Virtual Machine (if you need to see what it is run the ls /mnt/user/domains command to see what it’s name is on disk)

Wait. It’ll take a while, assuming you have a reasonably large OS installation disk.

Start your Windows VM & Install the VirtIO Drivers

Because Windows is now running as a Virtual Machine on KVM, it will think there is new “hardware” and will require (and benefit from) having the right drivers installed.

In the unRAID VMs tab, click on your newly created VM and click Start

After the VM has started, you can VNC into the machine and interact with it. You can do this one of two ways.

Click on the running Windows VM and select “VNC Remote”

(Preferred) Install a VNC client like TightVNC and connect to the VM directly. To do so, you’ll need to know the IP address of your server and connect to the VNC port of the VM (which is listed next to the running VM)

Right click on the .inf file (i.e. balloon.inf) and click install. (You may need to enable the viewing of file extensions to find the right file)

Repeat the above process for each of the following folders

NetKVM

vioserial

viostor

You may want to check Windows Device Manager to make sure there are no devices which have yellow warning exclamations next to them – if so, you’ll likely need to install an additional driver.

When done with the driver installation, navigate to the guest-agent folder and double click on qemu-ga-x64.msi to install the QEMU/KVM guest agent.

Shutdown the VM & update disk settings

Now that you know that the VM boots and you’ve got the drivers installed, you can stop the VM and update the physical disk to use the VirtIO bus which will give you better performance.

Stop the Windows VM. You can do this one of two ways – one, by initiating a Shutdown from within Windows. Or, you can click on the VM image in unRAID and select Stop which will also gracefully shut down Windows.

In the unRAID web UI, in the VMs tab, select the Windows VM and select Edit

Change the following settings:

Primary vDisk Bus: VirtIO

VertIO Drivers ISO: delete the entry

Restart the VM and make sure it’s operating correctly.

Reactivate your Windows license

Windows checks it’s license validity based on your machine’s hardware. Any time you change the hardware, Windows needs you to reactivate your license. You’ll need to run through the activation steps in the VM to re-activate your Windows license because Windows will think you just changed a lot of hardware.

To do that, search for “Activation” from the Windows 10 Start menu. From there, you should be able to follow the prompts to activate your copy of Windows. Somewhere along the way, in smallish font, it’ll ask you if you recently changed hardware. Click that option and go from there – i.e. log into your Microsoft Account, select the machine/license associated with this Windows installation.

(Optional) Remove Unneeded Software & Drivers

Because your old Windows machine had a lot of device specific drivers installed on it to operate on your hardware, you may have a lot of cruft that can now be removed. Log into your Windows machine and take a stroll through the “Add or Remove Programs” menu to see if there’s anything that can be removed. For me, I could uninstall any Intel and RealTek Drivers, ASUS motherboard features, etc. that were no longer relevant. It’s a nice thing to slim up the now VM’d Windows OS.

(Optional) Optimize the Window VM

(Optional) Reduce / Shrink the size of the VM image

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself… geez, I don’t need a XXX GB image file that just happened to be the size of your old OS hard drive just to run Windows. You probably want to slim that down. Here’s instructions on exactly how to do that.